


far from this place

by Starships



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Alternate Universe: Vampires, Au Ra vampyvamp chompychomp, Bisexual WoL, Biting, Blood As Food, Canon Divergence, Eventual Smut, F/M, Lots of blood but no violence, Non-permanent mating bonds, Smut, UST, Vampire WoL, WoLSexual Emet-Selch, shb spoilers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 05:55:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27728420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Starships/pseuds/Starships
Summary: Rarely throughout her life, she had fed on her lovers.All Xaela women and men, all prepared for what such a joining would entail. She had fond memories of every single one.Noneof them had felt like this.This was like sucking on a lightning bolt.“Let me take care of you,” he murmured, and when a quietpleasefell from his lips in a sigh on the wind, she opened her mouth for him.
Relationships: Solus zos Galvus | Emet-Selch/Warrior of Light
Comments: 5
Kudos: 60





	far from this place

She hadn’t eaten in fourteen days, and the Scions were starting to notice.

It was rare that they traveled like this, together and uninterrupted for so long as they were on the First. The benefits were clear: Thancred’s shoulders unwound despite the insidious creep of Ran’jit’s army through Il Mheg, Urianger’s fidgeting had quieted. Y’shtola, too, was rolling her eyes with gusto, a sure sign the lattices of her guard had dropped enough to, Twelve forefend, make a joke. 

The Warrior loved them all, basked in their welcoming glow and casual touches and even their bloodlust against the oncoming storm of sin eaters. 

But now she was hungry, and it was getting worse.

She wished she remembered what the flowers here were called. The Viis had told them, but honestly, the Warrior hadn’t been listening; she could smell Emet-Selch nearby and most of her focus was dedicated to pinching the petals between her bare toes until her skin was stained blue. Everyone else always handled the details, anyway.

 _He_ was always around these days. Sometimes it was woodsmoke and ozone if he’d been particularly aggressive about teleporting, sometimes it was sweat and bark if he’d been napping in the trees; always, always, it was his blood.

She could argue the fair assessment at this point that she was an expert in Ascians, but…

Emet-Selch smelled different. His heat was different. It set her teeth on edge and her horns tingling in the blasted, poisonous sun. The scales at the base of her tail itched.

Her _fangs_ itched.

When she wasn’t hunting sin eaters, or staring at the malm long legs of the Viis with Thancred, or kicking her sheets to her feet during another restless, sleepless night of sunshine, she was smelling him. Tonight, her third night of insomnia, there were thin, wispy trails of his scent lacing the air like a drug, and it was the only warning she got to his presence. His feet were pacing the circumference of her hut, hours after midnight.

She froze; her breath hitched. She clapped her hand over her mouth to silence any other startled reflexes, but that in itself was not quiet.

The footsteps paused, and ozone flared around her.

“Hello, hero,” his voice rumbled like thunder. “Can’t sleep?” The words traveled through the walls as though they were not there at all.

“Never can,” she said, only a ghost of a whisper.

“Me either.” The boughs cradling the village creaked against the presence of his power.

After a heavy silence stretched thin, his pacing resumed. The Warrior breathed as deeply as she could and held the air in her lungs; the scent of him was all she would allow herself, and even that was too greedy of her. She scratched at her scales.

The hunger within snarled its displeasure, and she drifted off to the ceaselessness of Emet-Selch’s vigil.

* * *

The wood was never still. In her circuitous journey through The Blind Forest she had found males from _two_ different birds of paradise, she was sure of it, and maybe a psychedelic mating dance was of no interest to anyone except her and Urianger but she was not about to start caring _now._ She could hardly be blamed if the result of furiously sketching plumage in her travel notebook was her branch snapping. Her tumble into the ravine below was jagged and offensively _pointy_ but her notebook was unscathed and she didn’t begin the day with dignity regardless.

So she was stuck, and it was because of a bird. So what. 

There were no cerulean flowers down here to guide her back to the top, and the dappled sunlight was reduced to a smattering of freckles on the mossy floor. 

It was dark, and soft, and warm, and from above her metal clacked together in a distinctly un-forest like sound. When she looked her eyes saw only glowing pinpricks and the gargantuan, looming shape of a man, high in the boughs above her.

It was rare that she heard or saw him before she smelled him, but between one breath and the next his scent slammed into her.

The maw below her ribs opened it’s jaws, sensing prey. The lizard part of her brain froze and pulled her blood from her limbs to her organs to conserve the energy to flee, sensing predator. 

The part of her that was simply a _person who liked him_ honestly didn’t know what to do.

“What the hells are you doing up there,” she said in lieu of something smarter.

“What the hells are you doing down there,” he called back. “It looks almost as if you’re trapped in a hole over _bird watching_ .” Maybe it was a hallucination brought on by hunger, but she _felt_ how smug he was. It was dense enough she could cut herself a slice for breakfast, if she fancied smug bastard on her menu.

She tried to tell herself she really, really didn’t. 

Notes of _moss_ and _sweat_ and _fresh, powerful blood_ trickled down to her. His sweat was heady and masculine, that always seemed true no matter the species of companion, but his aether stuck in her nose as if it were spiked pollen. It was tangy and sharp and sour and her mouth watered for it.

A swollen fruit, ripe for the taking.

She swallowed uncomfortably. Maybe he wouldn’t notice.

“Well, you’re wrong,” she said. “I can get out anytime I want to.”

“I’d expect nothing less, powerful thighs like yours. If you don’t mind, hero, I’m trying to nap—perhaps you are somehow unaware, but you are _loud_.”

She huffed. “Far be it from me to keep you. You _do_ seem lacking in beauty rest these days.”

She could hear the smile in his answering hum. The freckles of light danced above them both as she realized he was, in fact, draping himself along a branch to sleep.

“Fucking Ascian tree cats,” she muttered, opening her book to a blank page.

If she sketched him as a couerl bent in half and meticulously cleaning his own testicles, well. He’d never know.

* * *

She jolted awake when the weight of a foreign presence settled over her, dagger in hand before her eyes were even open. By the time her senses caught up to her reflexes, the hand with her weapon was pinned to the tree behind her and Emet-Selch’s neck was right in her face.

She sucked in her breath _—her first mistake_ —and held it as hard as she could.

Her eyes were locked on his carotid, on the steady _pulse_ and _pump_. He was the tide and she the beach, consumed with pulling him in, in, _in_ to her.

If she breathed again, she would feed.

He was a cacophony of experiences in a shroud around her. He was sunrise and sunset, he was power and the trembling of the earth in a quake. His blood was a river of life, _the_ river of life.

Would there be salt on his skin when she licked? 

How much?

What noise would he make, when she took him? Would he be a good boy and hold still for—

“Your frail rabbit heart is thundering, my dear.” His voice was a deleterious purr inside of her, an acid rubbing like the blasted cat he was against her nerves. “Did something dark and crawling in the woods startle you?”

Her heart _was_ thundering. Her mouth was watering. Her fingernails cut half moons into her palms and she’d never been so grateful the smell of her own blood didn’t trigger her need to feast.

He brought his nose to her hair and inhaled.

Gods, he was—

Smelling her. He was smelling her just like she was smelling him.

And it brought his neck closer.

Every disastrous, deep pulse of his heart was a marching bass drum that brought her mouth to his skin. She was feverish. Her fangs had dropped and her scales were clamoring to be clawed off her body as though she were in molt. 

“See something that interests you, hm?”

Fifteen days. How had she let it get this bad? She knew better, she knew better, she knew—

His aquiline nose trailed down her shoulder. 

“Perhaps you need to eat,” he suggested mildly. 

“ _Yes_ ,” she snarled, a voice that didn’t sound like her at all. It sounded like a beast. Her mouth was introducing itself to his skin, her nose nuzzling the fur of his coat out of the way.

She had no memory of dropping her weapon, but her fingers now laced with his where he pinned them. The palm to palm contact was too intimate, too raw. She knew without looking that he could see right through her, just from touching her palm like this. Mixing their life lines, seeing her future. If anyone she’d met was a prophet it would be him, and she’d always been too much a coward to ask the questions of him that mattered. 

She licked a long, wet stripe from his collar to his jaw, and her need for him exploded along with his taste. 

She had had her entire life to get comfortable with the notion of people as food. To be Xaela was to understand the call of life, the thirst for blood and battle and power. For her people it was just their way; there was ritual and intimacy to it, a sacred sharing to be kept private from outsiders.

A mating experience between the one who gives and the one who takes.

Gods but she’d give anything for a karakul to eat instead right now.

“You need to back up,” she hissed, the words messy and barely formed.

He pressed closer, pushing his throat against her lips. She whimpered, crushing his hand in a grip that would have broken a mortal’s bones, pleading for mercy with her fingerprints against his.

“Please,” she begged. “Please get off me.”

Tenderness wasn’t something she had experienced from Emet-Selch before, but to her surprise, it was here: “You need to eat,” he said, only a murmur, and his free hand stroked her hair. “I won’t tell a soul.”

Helpless, she sucked a bruise into the endless expanse of him, worrying at him with her starving mouth. He tasted like everything she never knew she wanted, even through the skin. 

“I can’t keep my distance from you,” she said, and it sounded pathetic even to her. “If I feed from you it will be even worse.” 

It was her job to be professional here. She had work to do, and he was in the way of it.

But she still heard his footsteps circling her hut every night, soothing her. She still rose to meet him when he drawled _try not to bore me._

She didn’t want to bore him. She very desperately wanted to do the _opposite_ of bore him.

“Perhaps it is convenient, then, that I do not feel inclined to keep any distance from you at all.” The hand in her hair made a fist and yanked her back, and there, she could finally see his eyes; hooded and heavy and golden, his gaze sinking like a stone to the pit of her belly. Her hips bucked helplessly against nothing.

 _Gods._ He was thousands of years old and she had just humped the air in front of him.

“Shh, shh,” he soothed. “I know what you need.”

She nodded mindlessly. He did, he did. It was right here, the river of blood before her. She stood on the banks, waiting with coin for the ferryman in her hand. 

He hooked an arm behind her and heaved her up and over. She was small in stature as Xaela often are, but she was _heavy_ , dense and hard with muscle, and he grunted at the unexpected weight. She landed in a heap of limbs on top of him, _rocking_ on top of him, but he paid the motion no mind.

He gazed up at her, for the life of him looking tousled and well fucked, and angled his head back into the forest floor, presenting his neck to her. 

A sign of trust. Vulnerable.

Intimate. 

She knew he could break her with a thought. Not even a complicated thought, but a basic, simple, child’s level of arithmetic. Two eggs at the market, a couple of flowers, that’ll be fourteen gil and _boom_ , your champion is toast. 

She shuddered, and he groaned like the great bow of a ship. She wished she knew where they were sailing, or if anyone was even steering. 

His hands sat placidly on her knees. She was spread for him, wide open across his body, but he was the fool with his tender neck exposed.

“This is… intimate, for me.”

“I should hope so. Ours is a most intimate of relationships, don’t you think?”

Was it? 

When did she start leaning in?

“That’s it, good girl.”

He was so close.

So warm.

Rarely throughout her life, she had fed on her lovers. All Xaela women and men, all prepared for what such a joining would entail. She had fond memories of every single one.

 _None_ of them had felt like this. 

This was like sucking on a lightning bolt. 

“Let me take care of you,” he murmured, and when a quiet _please_ fell from his lips in a sigh on the wind, she opened her mouth for him.

There was bliss in her fangs parting his skin as easily as opening a door. The first hot burst of him on her tongue made her sing, and when she swallowed it was spring air laden in lilac drifting in their window at night, griddle cakes with golden syrup in the morning, a shuffle of papers in his office. It was war and death and life and rebirth and she should never, _ever_ have considered herself an expert on Ascians.

He was openly moaning, a broken sound brittle enough to cut the air. His lack of shame in his pleasure spurred her on and she _pushed_ , tore, ripped into him until he was gripping bruises into her thighs and showering her in a litany of praise as she drank every drop he was willing to give. 

As it turned out, he was willing to give a great deal. 


End file.
